Not everthing bought with money is superficial. Certainly a lot is less superficial than dedicating your life to “in app payments made easy”. Turning down generational wealth so you can continue to pursue your dream of being a tech CEO seems like a wildly selfish decision to me. Just start a new company!
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20190422235813/https://www.theat...
Sure, but I’m pretty sure if you asked those parents if they’d rather lose all their money to make parenting easier their answer would be a resounding “no”.
See perhaps Nick Maggiulli's post "The Ideal Level of Wealth":
> Financial Independence (28.6x Your Annual Spending): $3.5M. Assuming you never wanted to work again, you would need about 28.6x your annual spending to cover your costs indefinitely [$120,000 * 28.6 ~ $3,500,000]. This 28.6 comes from the Kitces research[1] showing that the 3.5% Rule[2] is the safe withdrawal rate for a 40-year time horizon and beyond. This research suggests that if you can make it 40 years while withdrawing 3.5% per year, then you’ll likely make it 50 years (or more).
[…]
> Whether your goal is Coast FIRE or full financial independence, the ideal level of wealth in the U.S. is in the low-to-mid range of Level 4 ($1M-$10M), or $2M-$5M. I know this is a lot of money and many people will never reach it, but that’s why it’s an ideal. It’s something to strive for. It’s enough where you don’t have to worry about money anymore, but not so much that it becomes a burden or warps your identity.
* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-ideal-level-of-wealth/
Adjust the $120k annual spend for your own lifestyle and cost of living.
You're not going to fly private, but it will take most of the worry out of life. Morgan Housel, author of the recently release The Art of Spending Money (and previously The Psychology of Money):
> 00:50:16 […] You have the independence to be who you are and wake up every morning and say, I can do whatever I want today. That’s wealth.
* https://ritholtz.com/2025/11/transcript-morgan-housel-spend/
Similarly, I don't understand why the CxOs in my current (BigTech) company still work. You're done. You can do anything you want and yet you voluntarily continue to amass more?
Has it occurred to you that perhaps what they want is to be the CxO of a big tech company? There’s a lot of power, prestige, and impact on society that you can’t easily have if you quit. Maybe they really enjoy the work itself too.
Things happen. Expensive things. The security to be able to afford expansive cancer care without worry, to pay for therapy and specialized schooling for your child… these are huge, huge things and they happen to you (or your children, or your children’s children) no matter what you do or don’t do. This isn’t just about being happy to be frugal.
That’s just a perspective on hardship, it’s not the only way. People deal with hardships with many many tools. My favorite tools are dignity, grace, courage, personal strength, and ingenuity. Money is another tool, yes, but it tends to prevent mastery of the others.
Elsewhere in the comments there was talk about legacy. You can give your kids a bank account, and the examples that you had money to pay off problems. Or you can give them something else through your example. I choose the latter.
Will accept, I have no idea about his personal situation. Also feel the HN crowd may downvote my comment because it is not phrased correctly.
